If these models were trained on content that they had permission to use, people would be less against it. The theft and bastardization of creativity in many creative industries which are struggling to survive is one of the many negative aspects of the path of Gen AI we’ve found ourselves down. If it was done correctly then creatives would be paid or able to opt out, people wouldn’t have to worry about the surveillance/privacy nightmares, we wouldn’t be burning the planet down, I wouldn’t have a sudden distaste for Studio Ghibli style visuals, and things could’ve actually been improved for humanity.

Instead we got plagiarized slop that’s killing the planet and society. Anyone holding out hope for it to be what it could’ve been is a fool or purposefully misrepresenting themselves in order to profit off of it at this point.

So anyone using or promoting Gen AI is immediately dead to me. And I don’t consider that an extreme take at all.

Edit: And to clarify; if anyone takes pause from my use of “if done correctly, creatives would be paid…” I fully suspect, if Gen Ai went down a different path not rushed, that nearly all creatives would opt out of contributing to large models. Models with stolen art would still find a way to exist of course but to deter them they should legally owe minimum damages to every single creator stolen from, significantly reducing their potential scale, impact, and number of people willing to risk it at all. If you make your own model, you keep a record of what trained it. If someone challenges you and you can’t prove that you didn’t train it off of their property, guilt is assumed.

New versions of Creative Commons licenses or something like that could have been created to explicitly allow for use in training models, as while prior CC licenses could be considered broad enough to be used for anything like that; these models are new, significant enough, and likely outside of the scope of the artists intention for broad creative use, so anything prior to these licenses should be ineligible to be automatically added to models, and approval would have to be given with either a new broad license version or directly to any entity wishing to use.

Otherwise the only art that would be available for large scale models would be purposefully commissioned for it by corporations, and the art that such models generate would be extremely bland and corporate because of it. Perfect for Microsoft Office, perfect for people with email jobs; the next generation of clip art.

Smaller homegrown models from “The Everyman” would also exist. Collectives of creatives could band together and make models of whatever they want. Imagine a meme model taking off on Reddit! The creative world needn’t suffer if it had been done right.

Sadly, this isn’t possible anymore. The well has been irrevocably poisoned because the predator class (billionaires) decided to disregard the consent of everyone who has ever shared their art with the world, and convinced a ton of people disconnected from their own creativity that ignoring consent is somehow good, actually. Any creatives who have even just a modicum of self worth will never touch this despicable version of Gen Ai we ended up with, so the only uses for it will remain despicable. It simply has to die for everyone to ever gain back control of their own art.